Max Chandler-Mather (Griffith, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

How can a government that knows the serious pain that people are in across this country give so much to billionaires and big corporations and so little—scraps—to the people doing it tough? We know there are millions of renters and mortgage holders in serious financial stress right now, making tough choices between paying the rent or the mortgage and feeding their families. We know that people are struggling to put food on the table because the supermarkets are price-gouging and are being allowed to do it by the major parties. People are sending their kids to school with hungry bellies. There are ordinary people being forced to work multiple jobs just to make ends meet and missing out on time to actually live a good life.

Labor knows all of this—except, in this budget right now, every politician in this place will get $4½ thousand off their tax. That's at a cost of over $80 billion, just for the tax cuts for people earning over $200,000 a year.

Labor has $175 billion in tax handouts for property investors over the next four years. That is money that goes towards property investors that allows them to go to auctions and beat out renters trying to buy their first home and bid up the price of housing.

Despite oil and gas corporations last year making $164 billion in revenue, the revenue that the government will make from their oil and gas tax this year is just $1 billion. That is a 0.6 per cent return on their oil and gas tax. That means a nurse pays a higher tax rate than some of the biggest multinational gas corporations, including Chevron, Santos and Woodside. That's outrageous.

They've also announced and found in this budget, over the next 10 years, $50 billion extra in defence spending, to bring total defence spending to $750 billion over the next 10 years. Imagine how much public housing that could build. Imagine what that could do for putting dental into Medicare or making sure we could fully wipe student debt, not just tinker around the edges. Instead, that money is going to disastrous projects like the nuclear attack submarines, the AUKUS submarines, which have nothing to do with Australian safety and everything to do with backing up the United States' ambitions and backing in United States foreign policy.

And the government has the temerity to brag about a $9.3 billion surplus. They're sitting on $9.3 billion; it's just sitting there. That could build over 18,000 public homes in a single year, changing the lives of tens of thousands of people. But the government is just sitting on that money.

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